Jury sat back. “Why? Do you think I’m so shallow?”
“Of course.”
He knew she didn’t think he was shallow; that was the easiest way of telling him he wasn’t being truthful.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “Police work has been done before from a wheelchair. We don’t prize you for your ability to hop in and out of zed-cars. It isn’t a cross-country race you’re doing; it’s investigation.”
“Oh, please.”
She turned away, and Jury felt as if she’d slapped him. At that moment, he hated her. But the feeling washed over him and washed away, a wave receding in a moment.
But not her hatred of her condition. The air crackled with it. Along with the weight, Lu had lost the edge that had made her such a dominant force. So much of Lu was presentation. She was, certainly, not your classic introvert.
The neurosurgeon who’d done the procedure had unquestionably saved Lu’s life. Phyllis Nancy had told him that. She herself had been the doctor at the scene of the accident. The imperturbable Phyllis Nancy. He wondered how she’d gotten through school with two first names. He could never think of Phyllis without smiling.
“What are you smiling about?”
Jury flinched. “What? Nothing.” He felt ashamed.
“That wasn’t a nothing smile and it wasn’t about me.”
“You’ve gotten a lot better at reading minds, Lu.” He smiled again, a reprehensible, lying smile.
“Oh, I could always do that. Especially yours.”
He felt her gaze.
“You’re off the hook, Richard.”
He wanted to feel that as another slap in the face, something he didn’t deserve. It made him a little sick to think that he did.
She caught the look, not able to read it precisely but seeing uncertainty and ambivalence. “Come on,” she said. “We didn‘t-we don’t-love each other, for Christ’s sake.” She tried to sit up, and it looked to him as if her fragile spine exploded in pain. “Jesus! Doesn’t anybody have a drink or at least a goddamned cigarette?”
Jury felt his walk down the white corridor must be almost as painful as hers, lying in that bed.
You’re off the hook.
He did not want to explore that rush of feeling, distinctly like relief. He had been on the hook all right. He realized now that the hook had been sexual. If she’d intended to stay here, maybe even go back to her job with the Islington CID, he honestly didn’t know what he’d have done. Marry her? Insist on taking care of her somehow? He couldn’t imagine Lu Aguilar accepting either of those proposals. She’d know that they were offered out of guilt or pity or obligation.
The long white corridor seemed endless, the bank of elevators, the bright red “Exit” sign never getting any closer.
The way out never did.
6
He had left the flat the next morning for a mere twenty minutes, to get milk for his tea. Upon his return, when he went to put the milk in his refrigerator, he found a message affixed to the fridge door with a little magnet in the shape of a banana.
In his absence, Carole-anne had answered his phone. Probably on her way to work this morning she had heard the ring and had just popped in to answer it. Jury rarely locked his door.
The message was written in Carole-anne’s inimitable style; if the angel Gabriel had delivered messages like Carole-anne, Christianity might never have gotten a toehold:
“S.W. c’d sed high w. ds rep. w’mn mss in Chess. Thought U should know.”
Jury pondered. Maybe “S.W.” had also called his mobile. He checked it to find the battery dead. He cursed himself for forgetting to charge it and pondered the message again. He left it to make his tea and look at the paper he had bought along with the milk.
The murder in Chesham should have been getting minor treatment at this point. But, no, the London paper even revved it up a little. Wasn’t there enough going on in EC3 to make some murder in a Buckinghamshire village pale by comparison?
Apparently not. Jury supposed there was an element of fascination not only in the victim’s being beautiful and Jimmy-Choo-Saint-Laurent-clad, but also in being unidentified. His name in there, too; they were still milking it for all it was worth, once again going over the suspension because of the Hester Street affair a couple of months back, a boomerang effect, that had been. There had been a bit of a public outcry at this detective’s being punished for saving the lives of the little girls. So Jury was being fashioned the Met police paladin, champion of the unfortunate.
Christ. Jury tossed the paper on his coffee table, took a pull on his mug of tea as if it were a pint, and regarded the message again. “S.W. c’d…” Sergeant Wiggins called. That must be it. Well, he would see this Sergeant Wiggins in a few minutes, if he was the caller.
Jury finished his tea, collected his coat and keys, and left the flat.
Sergeant Wiggins, stirring his own tea with a licorice root, raised his eyebrows in question when Jury walked into the office. “Did you get my message?”
“Ah, yes. I got a message, or what passes for one, from Carole-anne.” He pulled it out and read, as phonetically as he could, “ ‘S.W. c’d sed high w. ds rep. w‘mn mss in Chess. Thought U should know.’ ” He looked up to see Wiggins’s deep frown. “I finally worked out that S.W. meant you.”
“Yes, but what-” Light broke. “Of course. That ‘w’mn mss in Chess’: that’s telling you a DS called from their High Wycombe HQ to let you know there’s a woman been reported missing.”
“Do they know who?”
“No. It was reported by an aunt who hasn’t seen the niece for three days, nearly four if you count this morning-”
Jury frowned. “That’s a bit of a wait.”
“Thing is, the niece that’s missing often goes into London for weekends, so the aunt thought that’s where she was. Anyway, this niece of hers wasn’t the victim. She’s a local.”
“And so might the victim be.”
“Not in this case.” Wiggins tapped the root against the tip of his mug. “The aunt-her name’s Cox, Edna Cox-called police yesterday and said her niece should’ve been home by Sunday night, that she’d never miss work on Monday, that she hadn’t rung. Then the Cox woman went to the morgue and said, no, it wasn’t her, and anyway, her Mariah-Mariah Cox being the niece-Mariah would never wear clothes like that. Police are using her costume to help with the ID. I mean, how many women round that area would be wearing that dress and those narrow-toed shoes by…”
“Jimmy Choo. And when did Mariah Cox disappear?”
“Well, she first missed her on the Saturday-but remember, she thought Mariah was in London for the weekend. It was on Sundays that Mariah usually came back, but she didn’t. Nor on the Monday-”
Jury was out of his chair. “I want to talk to the aunt.”
“But she said it wasn’t her niece, guv.”
“I don’t give a toss for that. One woman goes missing and a dead one turns up-what a bloody coincidence.” He pulled on his coat.
“But surely the woman would know her own-” The phone rang and Wiggins snapped it up, gave his name, and listened. After five seconds of listening, he held up a finger to Jury. “It’s DS Cummins again, guv, here-” He held out the phone.
Jury took it and sat on the edge of Wiggins’s desk. He listened, said he’d be there inside of an hour, and handed the receiver back to Wiggins.